WASHINGTON — President Obama presented a budget on Monday that is more utopian vision than pragmatic blueprint. It proposes a politically improbable reshaping of the tax code and generous new social spending initiatives that would shift resources from the wealthy to the middle class. Absent from the plan is any pretense of trying to address the main drivers of the long-term debt — Social Security and Medicare — a quest that has long divided both parties and ultimately proved impossible. The document instead indicates that Mr. Obama, after years of being hemmed in on his fiscal priorities because of politics...

Here is President Obama in a chat yesterday with CNBC’s Steve Liesman: STEVE LIESMAN: Mr. President, ... You’ve said a bunch of times that getting the wealthy to pay a little bit more, and you’ve succeeded in raising that top tax rate to 39% or rolling back the tax cuts. Is there a limit there? Is there a limit to how much you believe the government should take from an individual in terms of a top tax rate? PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know, I don’t have a particular number in mind, but if you look at our history we are still...

As a union tries to make CEO pay an issue, others question the comparison. Economist Antony Davies said that if McDonald's were to not pay its CEO or all senior management and instead divide those tens of millions of dollars among the minimum wage workers, each employee would end up earning about 1.5 cents more per hour. But some groups are using executive compensation to try and drive a public discussion. The AFL-CIO launched a website that is critical of some salaries, including the heads of some Michigan companies. The union reports that a minimum wage employee would have to...

Economic study suggests we're heading for a Blade Runner future Earlier this month, a group of economists released the results of a massive study looking at the economic prospects of people from across the United States. What they found was that the U.S. is like a patchwork quilt of different countries, where some regions offer people the economic prospects of a typical developed nation — and other regions are more like a developing country. This study debunks a few myths about the United States, including the idea that wealthy nations have wealthy citizens. It's a powerful reminder that nations are...

Financial QUESTION: Obama and Democrats Trying To SEIZE Retirement Accounts (IRAs, 401Ks) ? Aug 9, 2013 I want to know what other Free Republic Members know about this H.R. 2035: Automatic IRA Act of 2013 I got an e-mail stating: "Obama & BIG Government Are Planning To Seize Retirement Accounts!" President Obama’s FY2014 Budget Plan brings us one Large step closer to De-Privatizing IRA’s & 401k’s. Much like Obamacare, Obama’s “Automatic IRA” will force employers with 10 employees or more, to “automatically” enroll their workers in the new Government run accounts. Obama’s Automatic IRA will be managed by the Social...

If you thought the delay in the employer mandate was bad news for Obamacare, just wait. On Friday, Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekhar of the Washington Post discovered that the Obama administration had buried in the Federal Register the announcement that the government won’t be able to verify whether or not applicants for Obamacare’s insurance exchange subsidies are actually qualified for the aid, in the 16 states that are setting up their own exchanges. Instead, until at least 2015, these states will be able to “accept the applicant’s attestation [regarding eligibility] without further verification.” Without employer mandate, Feds to rely...

With his estimated wealth exceeding $200 million, Albert Arnold Gore has come a long way from the time he began a career in government politics. But it hasn’t all been a green path. He can thank some earlier events for paving over muddy ground, a time when his father, Al Gore Sr. met Occidental Petroleum’s CEO Armand Hammer at a cattle auction in the 1940s. When zinc was discovered on some of Gore’s land,

Kim Jong Un building 'mini world' with replica Big Ben and Eiffel Tower Chubby tyrant Kim Jong Un is building a “miniature world” in North Korea – with a replica of London's Big Ben at its heart. The dictator is set to open the theme park in capital Pyongyang – and has included the iconic clock tower. The new attraction, which opens this year, will also boast a copy of Paris’ Eiffel Tower. The secretive state famously doesn’t allow its citizens to leave the country – so it appears Jong Un has decided to bring the world to his people....

Indian tribes seek federal bailout money for casinos A native-American tribe struggling to keep its Foxwoods Resort Casino in the red is now turning to the U.S. government for a helping hand. The Associated Press reports that the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation has already received more than $4.5 million in grants from the Department of Health and Human Services and from the Interior Department in the last five years. But now members are facing tough times with its casino — which used to be a billion-dollar empire — and are looking at the government for more grants, AP says. Critics...

• Tendai Biti made the announcement at press conference declaring: 'Last week when we paid civil servants there was $217 in government coffers' • However he today contradicted his claims by saying the following day $30m was paid into government accounts • Result is culmination of years of ruinous economic policy by Zimbabwe's despotic President Robert Mugabe Zimbabwe's finance minister has taken a hard look at the cash strapped country's bank accounts - and discovered it only has Ł138 and 34 pence left. Tendai Biti made the announcement at press conference yesterday declaring: 'Last week when we paid civil servants...

With the fiscal cliff deal and many Obamacare taxes taking effect, Americans will be slammed with an estimated $264 billion in new taxes this year alone—making 2013 memorable for delivering one of the largest one-year tax increases in American history. The math breakdown of the new taxes is simple: Key parts of the Bush tax cuts will expire as a result of the new fiscal cliff legislation, hitting American taxpayers with a tax bill of about $39.5 billion each year for the next decade. … Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi issued a projection that the tax burden will cut GDP...

Here we go again folks, the Obama lies continue to flow. Remember when he said this? “I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan no family making under $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains, not any of your taxes.” Really. Then how is it that this week when people got their payroll checks they were a little thinner than they were in 2012? I’m not talking about the “evil rich”, but the average everyday worker. With the expiration of the payroll tax cut,...

Sometimes, watching a Democrat learn something is wonderful, like seeing the family dog finally sit and stay at your command. With President Obama back in office and his life-saving “fiscal cliff” bill jammed through Congress, the new year has brought a surprising turn of events for his sycophantic supporters. “What happened that my Social Security withholding’s in my paycheck just went up?” a poster wrote on the liberal site DemocraticUnderground.com. “My paycheck just went down by an amount that I don’t feel comfortable with. I guarantee this decrease is gonna’ hurt me more than the increase in income taxes will...

Pushing back against the Republicans' deficit-reduction strategy, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said this weekend that more tax revenues – not just spending cuts – must be a part of Congress's effort to rein in deficits. Pelosi said the tax hikes in the recent “fiscal-cliff” deal are a start, but don't go far enough to generate the revenues the government needs to run the country effectively. "In this legislation we had $620 billion, very significant … changing the high-end tax rate to 39.6 percent. But that is not enough on the revenue side," Pelosi told CBS's Bob Schieffer in...

On the One Hand… These should not be foreboding years. The U.S. is in the midst of a veritable energy revolution. There is a godsend of new gas and oil discoveries that will help to curtail our fiscal and foreign policy vulnerabilities — an energy bonanza despite, not because of, the present administration. Demographically, our rivals — the EU, China, Russia, and Japan — are both shrinking and aging at rates far in excess of our own. In terms of farming, the United States is exporting more produce than ever before at record prices. Americans eat the safest and cheapest...

Google avoided about $2 billion in global income taxes last year by shifting $9.8 billion in revenue into a Bermuda shell company, Bloomberg reported. That level is almost double the total from three years ago, Bloomberg said, citing a Nov. 21 regulatory filing by a Google subsidiary in the Netherlands. And it allowed Google to cut its overall tax rate almost in half. Google's action -- moving about 80 percent of its total pretax profit from 2011 to tax-free Bermuda -- isn't illegal. On the contrary, many companies have taken similar steps in recent years to avoid paying steep taxes....

Given what we know in 2012, saying that capitalism will make a society richer than socialism should be about as controversial as saying the earth is round, not flat. Yet, a recent Gallup poll shows that more liberals have a positive view of socialism than capitalism. This is only possible because there are so many perverse incentives that drive the promotion of socialism. If you're a politician, socialism puts power in your hands while capitalism takes it away. If you want to use the government to control people's lives, socialism is a wonderful vehicle to do just that while capitalism...

One of the earliest fears about tax-favored savings accounts like IRAs and 401(k) plans was that when this pool of savings grew large enough Congress would not be able to resist tapping it to help solve the nation’s debt problems. We’re about to find out if those fears—persistent for decades—have been justified. Everything including the sacred mortgage deduction is on the table as lawmakers wrestle with the fiscal cliff, a year-end avalanche of scheduled spending cuts and tax increases. With a combined $10 trillion sitting in IRAs and 401(k) plans, retirement accounts make a juicy target. Some of this money...

'Bama Claus Is Spreadin' It Roundoriginal music and lyrics by John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie, updated lyrics by Rebel_Ace You better vote "D" And never vote "R" To Get Stuff for Free From the Welfare Czar 'Bama Claus is spreadin' it round 'Bama Claus is spreadin' it round 'Bama Claus is spreadin' it round The Union's got a list, Who voted twice; Show it to the press they put it on ice. 'Bama Claus is spreadin' it round 'Bama Claus is spreadin' it round 'Bama Claus is spreadin' it round The Rich they are not Paying We know how...

PARIS — France’s Socialist government is proposing a slew of taxes — on art, on businesses, on the rich — that are drawing criticism for stifling entrepreneurship and scaring off the wealthy. “Unfortunately, I think the politics we are leading in France will turn out to be catastrophic for the economy, which is already in bad shape,” said French economist Marc Touati, author of “When the Eurozone Explodes.” “This is a serious mistake, something you learn in [Economy 101] — it will aggravate the recession and therefore shrink the tax base.” Led by President Francois Hollande, the French government proposed...

Our economy is lousy, the labor force participation rate is the lowest in 31 years, we’ve had 43 consecutive months with unemployment over 8 percent, and a record 47 million people are on food stamps, so one might expect President Obama would welcome as much help as he could get. Surely he would want private sector job creators – investors and entrepreneurs – to have the strongest possible incentives for turning around this Obama “recovery” where household incomes are falling faster than they fell in the Bush recession. But Obama’s priority is class warfare. That’s why he relentlessly denounces job...

Suburbanites of Ohio, listen up. As swing voters in the ultimate swing state, you will have an outsized impact on this election. President Obama has pledged to govern in the interests of middle-class voters like you. With so much resting on your shoulders, that is a promise you should scrutinize with care. What exactly are Obama’s plans for Ohio’s suburban communities? The answer may shock you. President Obama aims to help Ohio’s Democrats bail out your state’s struggling cities by forcibly transferring suburban tax money to urban treasuries. It’s a bold plan to redistribute the wealth of Ohio’s suburbs. It...

Exclusive: Joseph Farah compares billions given away to what's spent on border security It may be an apocryphal quote attributed to the late Sen. Everett Dirksen: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” There’s really no credible citation one can find that suggests he actually ever said those famous words – though I swear I can still hear him saying them when I was a child. Those words were reverberating in my mind again this week as it was revealed that Barack Obama has increased spending on foreign aid by 80 percent through last...

On a recent evening, a hip-looking young woman was sorting through a stack of crates outside a fruit and vegetable store here in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas as it shut down for the night. At first glance, she looked as if she might be a store employee. But no. The young woman was looking through the day’s trash for her next meal. Already, she had found a dozen aging potatoes she deemed edible and loaded them onto a luggage cart parked nearby. “When you don’t have enough money,” she said, declining to give her name, “this is what there...

In November 2008, the Americans who turned out to vote in the presidential election outnumbered the Americans who turned out to work full-time by more than 14 million. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 118,423,000 Americans worked full-time in November 2008. According to the University of California at Santa Barbara's American Presidency Project, 132,645,504 people turned out to vote in that month's presidential election. The presidential election voters outnumbered the full-time workers by 14,222,504. In that election, then-Sen. Barack Obama won 69,297,997 popular votes and Sen. John McCain won 59,597,530. The 14,222,504 margin between presidential voters and full-time...

Nobel Peace Prize Winners Take Aim at U.S. By CHASE SQUIRES, AP DENVER (Sept. 17) - Ten Nobel Peace Prize laureates chbishop called for world peace and took aim at U.S. policy makers, asking an enthusiastic crowd of 7,000 youth to demand that the United States pull back its military, spread its wealth and offer aid to developing countries. The Archbishop Desmond Tutu had stern words for the Bush administration. "Then how can you commit Guantanamo Bay? Take back your country," he said. Only the Dalai Lama, whose speech at the three-day PeaceJam convention at the University of Denver was...

If you listen to America's political hacks, mainstream media talking heads and their socialist allies, you can't help but reach the conclusion that the nation's tax burden is borne by the poor and middleclass while the rich get off scot-free. Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal, and I'm proud to say former GMU economics student, wrote "The U.S. Tax System: Who Really Pays?" in the Manhattan Institute's Issue 2012 (8/12). Let's see whether the rich are paying their "fair" share. According to IRS 2007 data, the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 22 percent of national...

One month to the day after his infamous ‘you didn’t build that’ speech, President Obama’s description of wealthy people did not include “smart” or “hardworking,” as he instead ascribed their success to good luck. “If you’re lucky enough, and fortunate enough, and been blessed enough to be in the other two percent, the top two percent, you still get a tax cut for your first $250,000 of income,” Obama said during a campaign stop in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “All we’re saying is after that, maybe you can do a little bit more to help pay down this deficit and invest...

(VIDEO AT LINK) President Obama: "Too many folks still don't have a sense that tomorrow will be better than today. And so, the question in this election is which way do we go? Do we go forward towards a new vision of an America in which prosperity is shared?(continued)

Burn Down the Suburbs? Not exactly, but Obama is already working to get rid of them. By Stanley KurtzEditor’s Note: This article is adapted from Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, by Stanley Kurtz, from Sentinel HC. President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools,...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Who does Obama think paid the taxes for the roads and the bridges and the stoplights? Who paid for this? Who paid for all of that? People that don't have anything? People who pay taxes paid for all this stuff! Folks, it's a shame that we have to sit here and react to this kind of sophistry and explain to people how this country was built and who did it and why it happened and how it happened. Because we live in a period of time where the president of the United States is trying to rewrite...

Tax cheats were given $1.4 billion in government-backed mortgage loans under President Obama’s economic stimulus, and the government doled out at least an additional $27 million in tax credits to delinquents who took the first-time-homebuyer tax break, according to a government audit released Wednesday. Under government rules, delinquent taxpayers are supposed to be ineligible for the mortgage insurance program unless they have reached a repayment agreement with the Internal Revenue Service. But the Federal Housing Administration didn’t have the right controls to weed out bad applications, said the Government Accountability Office, Congress‘ chief investigative arm. That meant FHA insured $1.4...

Obsession with income redistribution is destroying U.S. productivity President Obama’s re-election prospects dim by the day. When it comes to all-important pocketbook issues, Americans quite simply are worse off now than they were when this administration moved into the White House. The Federal Reserve released its latest “Survey of Consumer Finance” on Tuesday, which confirmed widely held sentiment with hard data: Americans are poorer today than they were in 2007, when the Great Recession hit. The difference between now and then is massive. The median household saw almost 39 percent of its wealth evaporate, and real income (that is, the...

Van Jones, one of the most effective organizers and strategists on the left, is out with a new book. Rebuild the Dream, which debuted last week on the New York Times bestseller list, takes its name from the organization Jones helped found a year ago to stir up a grass-roots insurgency against the plutocrats we now call the 1%—and now seek harness the insurgent energies expressed by the Occupy movement into lasting institutional reform. “The American dream—the idea that ours is a land where any hard-working person can better herself or himself—is at risk of being wiped out, right before...

I have several amusing posts about the left’s fixation on redistributionism, including this Halloween classic, this Elizabeth Warren takedown, this mockery of the Occupy Wall Street nitwits, and this caricature of Obama’s class warfare. In this grand tradition, here’s a funny poster sent to me by a reader.This is an appropriate point for the disclaimer that Obama is not a socialist, which technically requires government ownership of the means of production. As I’ve explained before, it’s much more accurate to say he’s a statist, a corporatist, or a redistributionist.And since we’re looking at definitions and this post features young children,...

"This bears on your reporting," President Obama said to journalists. "I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing then they're equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. And an equivalence is presented which I think reinforces peoples' cynicism about Washington in general. This is not one of those situations where there's an equivalency." "As all of you are doing your reporting, I think it's important to remember that the positions that I am taking now on the budget and a host of other issues. if we had...

WASHINGTON (AP) - This time around, President Barack Obama's message can sound decidedly down-to-earth. Four years after winning the White House, Obama is dealing with a different economic and political reality as he seeks re-election. He's focused less on a lofty vision for overcoming divisions and remaking Washington, and more on the most basic building blocks of middle-class economic security: a job, a house, a college education for the kids, health care, money for retirement. What Obama describes as the American Dream can seem a spare, fundamental aspiration, tailored for a campaign that looks to be fought over who is...

President Obama released his FY 2013 budget [Monday] morning. By his own numbers, his budget raises net taxes over the next decade by $1.56 trillion (Table S-9, page 225). As a percentage of the economy, tax revenues would rise all the way to 20.1% of GDP in 2022, far higher than the historical tax revenue average of 18.3% of GDP (Table S-1, page 205). Here are some of the tax lowlights: All 20 of the new or higher taxes in Obamacare are assumed to take place. That means that there will be a 3.8 percentage point surtax on investment income....

Obama: Jesus would tax the rich By: Jennifer Epstein February 2, 2012 10:12 AM EST President Barack Obama tied his proposal to raise taxes on wealthy Americans to his faith on Thursday, telling leaders gathered for the National Prayer Breakfast that Jesus’ teachings have led him to that conclusion. The rich pay more not only because “I actually think that is going to make economic sense, but for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’” Obama said at the Washington Hilton, delivering remarks at an annual...

You’ve played by the rules. Worked hard to put yourself through school. You’ve gotten a decent job and you pay your taxes. You’re faithfully paying down your mortgage and saving money in a 401(k) – all to secure your finances and your future. But now there are a lot more “takers” than “makers” in this country – and the impact is systemic and long-lasting. A prevalent new “moocher culture” is changing the character of this nation – that’s the core message of A Nation of Moochers: America’s Addiction to Getting Something for Nothing, a new book by Charles J. Sykes,...

We heard a lot on Tuesday night from President Obama about the wealthy paying their â€śfair shareâ€ť in his State of the Union speech. (Well, you heard it a lot; I read the speech and then commenced to have a life on Tuesday night.) Obama made half a dozen references to fairness in relation to taxes in the address, including taking a shot at Congress: But in return, we need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes. Just like with charity, perhaps fairness...

People earning over $1 million per year should pay an effective tax rate of no less than 30 percent, President Obama said in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. The president laid down one of his most political markers of the annual policy speech by crafting what he called the "Buffett Rule," named after the famous billionaire investor. "Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes," Obama said.

It turns out Mitt Romney paid $6.2 million in taxes in the latest year between federal and local taxes and I say bravo for him that sounds fair as hell to me. Really, just think for a moment and ask yourself does anyone get $6.2 million a year in services from the government? This past weekend is a perfect example. A nature preserve sits right behind my house, which is great because it's like having a giant backyard with deer, foxes, and occasional eagles. I worry about those giant trees that lean toward the house in such an ominous way...

President Obama will use his election-year State of the Union address on Tuesday to define an activist role for government in promoting a prosperous and equitable society, hoping to draw a stark contrast between the parties in a time of deep economic uncertainty. ...Mr. Obama will call for changing the corporate and individual income-tax codes so the wealthy pay more, both to finance government investments and to alleviate the rise in income inequality in recent years. Republican presidential candidates have countered that government should get out of the way.

Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income. The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families. "Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses,...

(CNSNews.com) - In a speech delivered at Osawatomie High School in Osawatomie, Kansas, on Tuesday, President Barack Obama argued that while a limited government that preserves free markets "speaks to our rugged individualism" as Americans, such a system "doesn't work" and "has never worked" and that Americans must look to a more activist government that taxes more, spends more and regulates more if they want to preserve the middle class. "'[T]here is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. 'The market will take...